URL du Jour Addendum

Shawn Macomber (aka "UNH's own Shawn Macomber")
describes the
scene at First Church of Roxbury yesterday.
Go read. Shawn endures the rhetoric of John Kerry et. al. so that we
more sensitive souls don't have to.

URLs du Jour (10/31/2005)

Everybody I like seems also to like Judge Alito
for the Supreme Court. Best place to go for links is Michelle
(ma belle). But Jeff Goldstein has a unique scoop: Senator
Feinstein's crib sheet for the upcoming confirmation hearings.
And (more seriously), he has a handy post
with quotes from noted libertarian (as opposed to conservative) sources.

Since I'd written to Senators Sununu and
Gregg asking them to oppose Harriet Mier's nomination, I dropped a note
this time around asking for them to support Alito.

Via Geek Press,
an impressive picture of the Grand Canyon Skywalk.
My knees go a little weak just looking at the picture.
Note: "glass bottom and sides."
I can safely predict that this is pretty "high up" (heh)
on the list of places you will never see Mrs. Salad.

Need a handy example of how someone can handle
a dreadful disease with extraordinary bravery and class?
Read
Cathy Siepp.

Quadrophenia

The Who's Quadrophenia is one of my favorite albums ever, undimmed
after … waitaminnit, let me look it up … Holy Crap
…
nearly 32 years. (It was released in America on November 3, 1973,
Britain on October 28.1973.)

However, I hadn't ever seen this 1979 movie based on the album.
(Maybe I had a bad reaction to the Tommy movie.) Blockbuster has
come to the rescue.

Well, it's OK. But it turns out that my mind's eye had already made
a better movie, sorry, so this was a bit of a disappointment. Jimmy
is supposed to have four personalities, but the main one we get is
"whiny loser."

I, personally, would have had Who music playing though every second of this
film.

I didn't know (or maybe didn't remember) Sting was in this, playing
the Bellboy.

URLs du Jour (10/28/2005)

The New York Times ran a story on recent military casualties
in Iraq; among the soldiers mentioned was Corporal Jeffrey Starr.
Read Michelle Malkin
to find out what the Times could have found "fit to print" about
Corporal Starr, but didn't.

Sahara

I rented this movie because I thought it would be dumb fun,
but it turned out to be more dumb than fun. (Although that
might just be me; Mrs. Salad really liked it.)

Just a lot of mindless action, one-dimensional
characters I didn't care too much about, mostly flat jokes, an absurd
plot. Even the sainted William H. Macy gives a lackluster performance.
(But Delroy Lindo was good, in his 1.8 minutes of screen time!)

An actor named Rainn Wilson has a role in this, and I kept
trying to figure out where I'd seen him before. IMDB coughed
up the answer: he plays Dwight in The Office (American version)
on TV. OK, I guess that's good acting.

URLs du Jour (10/27/2005)

The Harriet Miers nomination for Supreme Court Justice has been
withdrawn, and I'm for one relieved, because I cannot for the life
of me remember how to spell her name without looking it up; my precious
time
will be saved. Obviously
the opposition of this blog was the tipping point. Sources tell me
Dubya was
muttering "Et tu, Pun Salad?" repeatedly for the past few days.

On to the usual miscellany:

Spurred by the death of Rosa Parks, Thomas Sowell writes
on the secret history of the segregation policies that
dictated Mrs. Parks should have to give up her bus seat
to a white man:

Far from existing from time immemorial, as many have assumed, racially
segregated seating in public transportation began in the South in the
late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Those who see government as the solution to social problems may be
surprised to learn that it was government which created this problem.

On a related note, say you were an editorial cartoonist, and you
wanted to pen a cartoon on the topic of Mrs. Parks' passing.
What would you draw? Go ahead, think on it a bit, I'll wait …

Ooooh, I want an Olive
Symphony; it's reviewed by David Pogue here
and it costs a mere $900!

Well, probably not really. I don't see anything here that I wouldn't
be able to do on a more conventional computer, and have a certain
amount of fun in setting up. But the Symphony does look
very cool and seamless. (And probably quieter than a real computer.)

And (staying in the consumerism theme), this
is just amazing. (Via Lileks. Like him, it doesn't make
me want to scurry on down to the Ikea outlet, or even want to hang out
with any of the people in the ad, but still … whoa.)

A Look Into the Mind of Howard Dean

Andrew Sullivan is fast becoming a reliable source of unintentional amusement.
He points approvingly to this
Shockwave Flash page, calling it "jaundiced but funny."

Well, go ahead and look. To my mind, it's a sad look at how
some Democrats think: basically, Republicans are without exception
(pick any combination) evil, stupid, demented, bigoted, violent,
shallow, and/or delusional. The proper view of them is an
angry combination
of fear and hatred.

Every time I get depressed enough about Republicans, something always
seems to pop up that depresses me more about Democrats. When are they
going to learn that "I hate Republicans"
is not a winning slogan?

URLs Du Jour (10/26/2005)

John Podhoretz has a clarifying column discussing
the real reasons behind the dung-flinging between Judith
Miller and everyone else at the New York Times (Free registration, but
it's worth it.)

OF course, none of this Miller character assassination has anything to
do with the Valerie Plame story. Rather, it has to do with the war in
Iraq, weapons of mass destruction—and the peculiar solipsism of
both the staff of The New York Times and the paper's liberal
readership.

Convincing, certainly more so that Andrew Sullivan declaring the sliming
to be "impressively honest and appropriately self-critical."

Many "Blaine Amendments" in state constitutions
prohibiting government aid to students in
non-government schools were couched in the
anti-Catholic bigotry
of the late 19th century. This is part of
the "secret
history" of modern dogmas
of church-state separation: born in less-than-noble
impulses that its admirers neither admit nor (probably) know about.

Progressives, including Richard Ely, Louis Brandeis, Felix Frankfurter,
the Webbs in England etc., were interested not in protecting women but
in protecting men and the race. Their goal was to get women back into
the home, where they belonged, instead of abandoning their eugenic
duties and competing with men for work.

If (for some reason), you are not in total despair with the
fiscal profligacy of the Republican-controlled Congress, Glenn Reynolds
might push you over the edge with his Tech Central
Station column about the proposed 3 Gigabuck subsidy proposed for owners of analog
TVs not served by cable providers. Promoting this is Senator
Ted Stevens (R-Alaska). Glenn comments:

I suppose that there are worse ways to waste the taxpayers' money -- I
can't actually think of any at the moment, but given Congress's
ingenuity I suppose that Ted Stevens and his colleagues probably could
-- but this strikes me as pretty pathetic, especially when the
government is laying off scientists for lack of money. Subsidizing TV
and starving science seems like a recipe for something short of
national greatness.

Via Galley Slaves: Father
Neuhaus takes
on major point of religious strife between two of his parishoners.
If Father Neuhaus were the priest at our
local church, I might convert.

UNH alum Shawn Macomber links up
Boston's Fruit and Vegetables Gang and the satanic metal underground.
Well, the link's more than a little strained. But
bottom line: there are lots of folks out there that you don't want to
meet, ever, even as part of a culturally-broadening experience.

It seems nearly
everyone has blogged the cool "rotating pink dot" optical illusion,
but if you haven't seen it yet, go.

FCC Gores College Oxen

Inside Higher Ed has an article
today on new FCC rules
issued earlier this month that demand that colleges allow law enforcement
entities the ability to remotely install "wiretaps" on the college
networks. (A subpoena is still required as before.)

The article points out that such changes are extremely complicated and
expensive, and are expected to generate little gain over the current
situation (where wiretaps need to be installed with the cooperation
of the college network gurus, bless their hearts):

The American Council on Education, based on analyses done on a number of
campuses, estimates that making these changes would cost colleges
approximately $450 per student, or a total of $7 billion.

College groups that are objecting to the new rules say that they are
particularly upset because there is no history of federal authorities
having difficulty placing wiretaps in college networks because there is
no history of them seeking to do so. "This is an awful lot of money for
very little gain," said Terry W. Hartle, senior vice president for
public and government affairs at ACE.

So let's see here: government regulations with cost/benefit ratios
totally out of whack, where costs
are pushed onto consumers, typically "invisibly" via
cost increases. Most people with even a smattering knowledge
of the libertarian critique of government regulation will
respond: nothing new here!

Of course, the Inside Higher Ed folks are off base in
picturing this as a particular problem for colleges: private ISPs will
have to comply with the rules as well, and similarly pass the costs
along to their customers.

It would be nice if people would
wake up to the perniciousness of
burdensome regulation everywhere, not simply when their
ox is being gored.

URLs Du Jour (10/24/2005)

Finally, there is Mao's place in history. I agree that Mao was a
catastrophic ruler in many, many respects, and this book captures that
side better than anything ever written. But Mao's legacy is not all bad.

Comments Roger:

Kristof's blithe "the ends justify the means" contempt for human life
boggles the imagination. 70 million dead? 40 million dead? At numbers
like that who could know really? The Great Helmsman was a mass murderer
beyond comprehension. To excuse it in on any level is morally repellent
and deeply dangerous to the future of humanity.

Roger also points to BizzyBlog
who notes "Kristof's 'Hitler did good things too' excuse-making."
Luskin also comments: "Walter Duranty still works at the Times."

Also making waves the past few days is the increasing strife between
(Pulitzer) prizewinning NYT reporter Judith Miller and (it seems) everyone
else at the Times.
Gratifyingly, the pissfest is being carried out largely in the
public eye for the amusement of all who care.

Mickey Kaus cares, of course. In a longish Kausfiles posting,
he analyzes a Maureen Down column (which recommended
"nail[ing Judy Miller] to a chair", figuratively, of
course) and editor Bill Keller's e-mail to NYT staff. He
dubs such responses "incoherent." (Andrew Sullivan, on the other hand deems
Keller's memo "impressively honest and appropriately self-critical."
Read 'em both and decide for yourself who's more on target. To my mind,
it's Kaus.)

It's hard not to be on Judy's side here,
because she has the right enemies. Many, if not all, of the
sins she's ostensibly
being pilloried for did not affect what actually appeared in
the Times (unlike the work of, say, Kristof).

There's no serious disagreement that two major crises of our time are
terrorism and global warming. …
The best solution is to increase the federal gasoline tax, in order to
keep the price of gas near its post-Katrina highs of $3-plus a gallon.

Did the NYT ever see a problem to which a tax increase was not the
answer?

Now, non-silly
people have also made the argument for increasing gasoline taxes. But
claiming it would decrease terrorism depends greatly on the likelihood
of a very Rube Goldberg-style chain of events
hinging on the behavior of Saudi Arabia
in response; see Arnold Kling in Tech Central Station
for reasons to be dubious at best.

Even a fuel consumption tax would not reduce world demand for oil by as
much as it would reduce our own consumption of fuel products. That is
because as the price of oil declines, demand will increase in other
countries.

A similar point can be made with respect to the tax increase's effect
on global warming. (Even if you buy into the dubious premise that
incremental changes in gasoline consumption will significantly affect
global temperature changes.)

But to the editorial writers at the Times, it's simply taken for
granted that shoveling more money into the government maw will have
beneficial effects.

This isn't particularly recent,
but (hey) it's new to me: a straightforward tribute
from Joe Bob Briggs about Bob Hope. In keeping with today's
theme: it should have been in the NYT, but wasn't.

A History of Violence

Movie weekend concludes with a solo trip to the theater to
see this impressive flick. Ed Harris and William Hurt contribute
their superior acting chops; Hurt in particular delivers an over-the-top
performance that gets pretty funny. And Maria
Bello delivers her usual hot mama bit. Viggo Mortenson, the protagonist,
kind of watches it all go by without a lot of expression change.

The title has an interesting double meaning. One refers
the supposition that the
hero has had a violent past; the other lies is the more obscure use of
"history" as an exploration of related phenomena: we see
violence generated by many different situations and with
many rationales.

On the other hand, it's pretty easy to watch it on the straightforward
thriller level.

Saw

I saw Saw. Did you see Saw? So I saw Saw, sue me. Sigh. What can I
say about Saw?

Well, a couple things: Cary Elwes looks worse in this movie alive than he
did while being dead in The Princess Bride. The girl who played the
ditzy receptionist in Becker (Shawnee Smith, I looked it up)
plays a more serious part here; gosh, she can do more than play ditzy.

And, yes, it's all moody and icky and creepy. But I had a hard time
buying the premise that an evil mastermind can really plot things out
quite so meticulously. And when his hideous motivation is finally
revealed, it's kind of hard to buy that too.

Today You Die

Movie weekend begins with Steven Seagal's latest direct-to-DVD movie. He
plays a Robin Hood-style crook trying to go straight. Unfortunately, by
sheerest coincidence, his first straight job turns out to be a heist
of twenty million dollars in an armored car. Steven winds up in jail,
and the money winds up missing.

The plot mainly exists to support a steady
flow of bad guys for Steven to shoot, stab, slash, and blow up.
(Some lessers may have been merely maimed, but
it's hard to say for sure.) I kind of lost track of who they all were.

There is also some supernatural bushwa involved with Steven's main
squeeze having some sort of Tarot-like visions. This doesn't turn out to
be relevant to anything else in the plot, as near as I can tell.

Moan

The Wall Street Journal reports that "in a move that signals the
increasing importance of animal-welfare issues to the food industry, Bon
Appètit Management Co., which operates 200 cafeterias in colleges
and corporate campuses, plans to buy eggs only from hens that have not
been confined in cages.

Right. That is a marked improvement: cutting out the middleman and
paying the hens directly. And (obviously) if they're not in cages,
they'll be wanting some walking-around money.

My Breathlessly Awaited Position on Harriet Miers

I've written our New Hampshire senators that I'd prefer they
vote against the confirmation of Harriet Miers. Sorry to those
folks on the other side; the nomination will almost certainly
be withdrawn now that this blog's mighty clout has come into
play.

This is (as far as I can recall) my first letter to my senators.
I'm a little worried that this is the first step down the road
that ends with
semi-coherent letters to the editor and deranged rants at town
meetings. Well, those folks have interesting lives, I suppose!

UPDATE: I oppose the Miers nomination. My bid for fame and
fortune, well fame anyway, at The Truth Laid Bear.

URLs du Jour (10/18/2005)

In a refreshing change from the usual, an assault on
collegiate free speech from the right wing. Inside Higher Ed
reports
that a pro-evolution website developed by UC-Berkeley is the target of a lawsuit alleging a violation of
the separation of church and state. Because?

The site contains a links section that notes the many religious
organizations that have stated that faith is not incompatible with
evolution, and these links violate the First Amendment, according to the
suit.

Interesting tactic: pit two clauses from the First Amendment
against each other.

Mark Gauvreau Judge examines a publication for college
students recently emitted from the folks at Newsweek and finds it
uniformly predictable and dull.

Charles Rocket, RIP

Tim Cavanaugh writes, in Reason's Hit&Run blog,
that Charles Rocket, member of the Saturday Night Live cast for part of
one awful
season (1980-81) recently committed suicide
by cutting his own throat in a field near his home in Canterbury, CT.
Yeesh!

Semi-guilty confession: I've been a Saturday Night Live fan since 1975.
But at least I have some authority to claim:
There were less funny SNL cast members than Rocket, although not many.
Cavanaugh writes
that Rocket was allegedly a "repackaging" of Bill Murray's attitude, but Bill
Murray, unlike Rocket, always seemed to want to let us in on the joke.

He had a reasonably successful post-SNL career in TV and movies. This
was unfortunately not enough to save him from that old dark night of the
soul, which can nab even the ultimately hip.

Fearless prediction: there will be no "SNL: Best of Charles Rocket" DVD.

I'll Sleep When I'm Dead

This is putatively a noir thriller, set in gritty London.
Clive Owen is an ex-gangster, back in town to find out
what happened to his brother,
who (it turns out)
has committed suicide in response to humilating brutalization.

The most remarkable things about this movie: (a) the time it spends
on tangents not directly relevant to the main plot thread; (b) the way
it ends, with things not entirely resolved.

Apparently we're also supposed to buy a romantic relationship between
the 60-year-old Charlotte Rampling and the 41-year-old Owen? Dubious.

But (all in all) not bad, if you're in the mood for a thriller without a
lot of action.

I hate it when I am sympathetic to arguments on both sides of an issue
as it threatens my image as a benevolently close-minded, dogmatic,
doctrinaire ideologue.

Yeah, me too. Except you can elide the "benevolently" in my case.

His column is (no surprise) on Miers. He makes a useful distinction
between critizing the pick and advocating her Senate rejection.
At least I think it's useful. As I type. Given my wimpiness
open-mindedness on the issue, I'll probably change my mind
for the next person to argue otherwise.

URLs du Jour (10/13/2005)

Mark Steyn has the best description of the movie Serenity
that I've seen:

…it's what Star Wars might look like if George Lucas had less money and
more to say.

"Read the whole thing."TM

Michael Fumento debunks the living legend, Erin
Brockovich, and laments the low standards of the Harvard School of Public
Health.

I know literally thousands of loyal readers have been waiting
for the answer to the question:
will Pun Salad endorse Harriet Miers for Supreme Court Justice?.
(And when I say "literally thousands of", I mean: "some non-negative
integer value, almost certainly zero".)

When I start entertaining such questions seriously, please someone
lend me a nail I can use to puncture my overinflated ego.

Go see the big legal brains (e.g.,
Bainbridge,
Reynolds,
Althouse,
Hewitt, et. al.)
discuss the merits; you can read 'em as well as I. I'm impressed with
the mutual respect and general high level of the discussions between
the bloggers. (Well, there's always an exception: Andrew Sullivan
refers disdainfully to "little Hughie Hewitt". Classless.)

I do sometimes wonder where the Official List of Objective
Qualifications for Supreme Court Justices were written down.
I'm pretty sure everyone is not working from the same
up to date copy. Still, everyone's so certain Harriet
is/isn't qualified, I'm pretty sure such a List must exist.

Anyway, what I meant to say here is: John Fund has a real
impressive
article at Opinion Journal today about
the "vetting" process for Harriet. He says the process was badly flawed; it's
hard to disagree, if he has his facts right.

Kung Fu Hustle

An Amazon reviewer does a fine job of putting this movie
in a nutshell: Looney Tunes meets Kill Bill. It's a
good deal of fun to watch. The writer/director/star,
Stephen Chow, obviously loves
movies; there are a number of quick homages in scenes
and dialog.

Overall, it's a welcome relief from Hollywood's cookie cutter factory. I
can almost guarantee that you've never seen a movie anything like this.

Point Blank

This is a weird little movie, based on The Hunter, the first novel
in the "Parker" series by Donald Westlake (writing as Richard Stark).
Lee Marvin plays a renamed protagonist, Walker, who's been betrayed and
shot
by (respectively)
his unfaithful wife and his unfaithful
partner in crime after a successful heist.

This is an early John Boorman movie, and it has a lot of arty
photography and a nightmarish feel. Dialog is (seems to me) intentionally
unrealistic. And the plot is ludicrous. But it's a lot of fun to watch.

It's also interesting to compare this with a later movie version of the same
novel, Payback with Mel Gibson. Mel's character is also renamed for
some reason as Porter. Porter kills a pile of people on his way to
retrieving his just deserts. Walker, on the other hand, kills nobody
(something a lot of reviewers miss, I've noticed); people keep winding
up dead, though. Porter winds up with his money and the girl; Walker
winds up with nobody, and it's not clear whether he gets the money or
not.

Star Trek: Nemesis

Another testimony to my inability to resist buying movie number
ten when I've bought one through nine. You know those old cartoons
that would turn a character's head into a lollipop (helpfully
labelled "Sucker") when he was gulled? I'm sure that's how Paramount
looks at folks like me.

But, like Star Trek V, it's not that bad. It's just that there's a lot
of bad stuff in it. There's a pointless-action
driving scene, batting barbarians
on a desert planet; was this just to satisfy some moron who said "we
need some action at this point in the movie"? Or to have something to
put in the video game? Who knows?

Equally superfluous is a loooong
one-on-one fight between Riker and a baddie who's
transported himself onto the Enterprise. Instead of being drawn into
the movie, I'm wondering whether Frakes demanded this be inserted as a
condition of his contract.

Extra disk has a lot of, well, extra stuff. A number of deleted scenes
made me wish they'd been left in and some other stuff cut out.

This looks like it was the last roundup for the Next-Generation crew.
That's a darn shame.

URLs du Jour (10/7/2005)

University Folly Update

The folks at Inside Higher
Ed report that the professor responsible for the Native-American-only
sections of a many-sectioned freshman English course at Arizona State
has been told "you can't do that" by ASU administrators.

They link to said professor's ASU web
page (which has had the notice of racial segregation removed). The
professor is truly a child of the 60's.

UPDATE: You might want to check out FIRE's
reaction, in which they use the Internet Wayback Machine to check on
how the statements of ASU admins match up with reality. The admins wind up
reality-challenged.

URLs du University Follies

A collection of University related antics.

The heroes at FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education)
publicize
the existence of racially-restricted classes at Arizona State.
These are called the (I am not making this up) "Rainbow Sections" of
their English Comp classes for freshmen, and are open to Native
Americans only.

What sort of self-respecting student of any hue would want
to be in a course taught by such clowns?
(Via Joanne Jacobs)

Or for that matter, who would want to subject themselves
to the education program at Washington State University?
The travails of one Ed Swan are described
here.

A national civil liberties group is defending a Washington State
University undergraduate because the College of Education threatened to
terminate him from the education program this fall after he expressed
conservative religious and political views in class last school year.

I'm not exactly prompt with this one, but Evan Coyne Maloney
has been all over the furor at Bucknell caused by an e-mail
ad for an event sponsored by the university's conservative
group:

Where were you during the months following September 11?
Major John Krenson was hunting terrorists.

Administration (apparently) hit the roof over the "hunting terrorists"
bit and called the responsible parties in on the carpet. Worse, they
then tried to obfuscate their role in this bit of free-speech chillin'.
Read all about it here.

Fellow denizens of the bottom rungs of university
employment are often puzzled by the bizarre behavior and
gross incompetence of higher-ups. It's kind of like watching
Animal Planet with the sound off, so you can't hear the helpful
British narrator explain what's going on.
It will perhaps help to
read an essay at the "Inside Higher Ed" website entitled "The
Peter Principle in Academe" by Margaret Gutman Klosko, explaining
where these people come from, why they act the way they do, and their
inevitable destiny.

But, if you're interested in that,
you should also read Arnold Kling's recent article
at Tech Central Station on "'Economic Man' vs. 'Status Man'". Thesis:
deep-thinking people like to look down their noses at folks with economic
("money-grubbing")
motives. What deep thinkers leave unexamined are the non-economic
motives to behavior: they can be, and often are, worse, as in
status-seeking. The effects are magnified in Academia.

Professors are fond of speaking of the higher motives of academic life,
such as the pursuit of knowledge and truth. Accordingly, they would
reject economic approaches such as tuition vouchers or giving credit on
the basis of test results rather than institutional status. In reality,
academic resistance to such ideas is driven by the basest of motives --
the drive for status. The status-serving myth is that colleges and
universities are more "pure" to the extent that they operate on a basis
other than economic motivation. However, I believe that the opposite is
the case: economic motivation would represent a step up from
status-seeking.

Redundancy at Achenblog!

Joel Achenbach's blog
at the Washington Post is an occasional read.
He's smart and funny. But this entry
contains an egregious blunder, referring to a recent column by George Will
(referenced below):

You have to love Will: No one more multi-syllabic is gutsier, and no
one gutsier is more multi-syllabic.

I thought that was extremely clever wordplay
… for about a minute, then
realized there was less there than met the eye. Precisely
half as much, in fact.

Suppose we have a graph expressing multisyllabosity versus gutsiness.
(Or should that be "multisyllabaciousness"? Never mind.)
We'll arbitrarily rate both quantities on a zero-to-twenty scale,
because 20 is the first number I thought of:

Let's, again arbitrarily, give George a score of 10 on both quantities:

We could put other columnists on there, but that would be invidious.

That allows us to divide Punditdom into four regions, which we will
pretentiously label with roman numerals:

So in region I are the pundits who are more multi-syllabic
but less gutsy than Will; inhabitants of region II
are more multi-syllabic and more gutsy; region III
holds the less-gutsy short-worded wimps, and region IV
contains monosyllabic gutsier-than-George knuckle-draggers.

Now when Joel says

No one more multi-syllabic is gutsier …

that's the same as saying there's no pundit in region II of
the graph. And when he says:

… and no one gutsier is more multi-syllabic.

that's, well, also saying there's nobody in region II. Hence,
redundant, and unworthy of a professional writer.

URLs du Harriet

It's seemingly all Harriet, all the time, out there in Blogville.

Harriet has made George F. Will so mad, he
may have spilt tea on his favorite necktie. Anyway,
if you want to similarly hit the ceiling, check out his latest
column. No excerpts here, it's a closely reasoned argument and you
should just go Read The Whole Thing.

But then go read "Will's Idiocy" on the American Spectator blog. Dude, can't we just all get along?

URLs du Jour (10/3/2005)

La Shawn Barber was asked to "respond" to Bill Bennett's remarks
on hypothetical racially-selective abortion's effect on crime rates,
and she's all over it. (Amusingly, her previous post claimed she was getting
lazy about blogging. She got over that pretty darn quick.) Full of good
links that will help you get up to speed on the issue, if you're not.

Why is government getting so big? Nathan Smith has the
answer at Tech Central Station: it's clever libertarians.

At Reason, Tim Cavanaugh comments
upon the trailer for the upcoming movie V for Vendetta. Nothing
earth-shattering here, save for this description of
Queen Amidala I found extremely funny:

Portman, a thespian I wouldn't believe if she were reading the line
"Your name is Tim Cavanaugh," looks as unpersuasive as ever, …

I love that; I hope I remember to steal
adapt it to my own use at some later date.

And Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers has a blog!
How about that? First article: "OMG I CAN'T BELIEVE I'M THE NOMINEE!!!"

You're Not Paying Attention, Leonard

Howard Kurtz reports
on the Washington Post's in-house "critiques". It's very inside-baseball
stuff, so most normal people would probably be indifferent. But it's
illuminatory as to the attitudes driving an allegedly influential major
newspaper. What really caught my eye, was this quote from Marie Arana,
editor of the "Book World" section:

The elephant in the newsroom is our narrowness. Too often, we wear
liberalism on our sleeve and are intolerant of other lifestyles and
opinions. . . . We're not very subtle about it at this paper: If you
work here, you must be one of us. You must be liberal, progressive, a
Democrat. I've been in communal gatherings in The Post, watching
election returns, and have been flabbergasted to see my colleagues cheer
unabashedly for the Democrats.

No real surprise there, I suppose, other than Marie's straightforward
honesty. I'm far less flabbergasted than she.
However, the response by Executive Editor Leonard
Downie is, well, …

Downie says he is concerned if some staffers are openly displaying
political preferences but that Arana's comments were valuable and "made
clear that we do have a diverse staff when it comes to ideological
backgrounds."

What? No, Leonard, that's exactly the opposite of what she said.
Are these the reading skills you're bringing to the job of
freakin' Executive Editor?

Night Moves

I'm a fan of the private eye and film noir genres, and this is kind of
both, and just a fine movie overall. Gene Hackman gives an understated
and subtle performance as Harry, an ex-football player turned private
investigator. His dialog is classic wise-cracking PI, and things start
out as a straightforward detective story. But this movie
tries to show that his profession is built on corrupt and shaky
foundations (a little heavy-handedly).

Also dancing on the fine line between clever and annoying is the interplay
between the movie's title and Harry's reference to "knight moves" in the
chess game he's analyzing. The player he obviously identifies with
had a win if only he'd seen the correct knight moves. Observes Harry:
"He played something else and he lost. He must have regretted it every
day of his life. I know I would have." And, sure enough, Harry misses
his correct moves too.

This movie was made in 1975, and displays that era's more casual
attitude towards showing boobies.

xXx: State of the Union

Whoa. This movie is impressively bad. Boring, I fell asleep a
couple times. A complete waste of time. It's like an action-thriller
parody where they forgot to put in any humor whatsoever. There are a
couple good actors here, but they deliver their lines as if they were
concentrating on calculating how many dollars per spoken word they were getting
paid. Special effects by Industrial Light and Magic, but they must have
contracted with
their bargain-basement department specializing in cartoonish-looking shots.

And I actually kind of liked xXx, the previous movie in the series.
But this movie is obviously aimed at coldly extracting money from the
pockets of idiots who mindlessly see action movie sequels. Uh, like
me.

Ebert gives this two and a half stars, which further cements my opinion
of him as nearly totally worthless.

School Days

The indefatigable Spenser returns once again, and this indefatigable
fanboy lines up to read about it once again. In this series entry,
our hero is hired by a no-nonsense older woman to clear her grandson of
a mass shooting at a snooty suburban private school. The only problem
is that the kid seems undeniably guilty. So Spenser concentrates on
trying to figure out what really happened, which nobody really wants him
to do.

If you follow the series, this one is notable by the minimal presence
of Susan Silverman, who's out of town for nearly the entire book.
And Hawk is entirely absent. Lacking these two usual conversational foils,
Spenser starts talking to Pearl, Susan's dog,
quite a bit. Also himself. I appreciated this,
because as much as I love Hawk and Susan, the conversations
between them and Spenser have long since gone utterly predictable.

In a disturbing development, however, Spenser wears a Pittsburgh Pirates
ballcap at the beginning of chapter 22. What's up with that?

URLs du Jour (10/1/2005)

Your Google Search du Jour is insinuendo; try to guess
the number of hits before you click. Inspired by this
post from the Man Without Qualities, dissecting a Times Select
column by "Herr
Doktorprofessor Paul Von Krugman."

Protein Wisdon provides
all you need to know with respect to Bill Bennett and the manufactured
controversy over his radio show comments about hypothetical
selective abortion and the crime rate. Most interesting is the claim
that Bennett should have known better than to use a formulation that
could be yanked out of context and kerfufflized. Saith Mr. Wisdom: "such
an argument effectively gives the interpreter power over the grounds of
interpretation and relativizes language." And of course, he's right. But
for the folks who engage in that sort of thing, that's exactly what they
want.

Serenity

One of the things I did with the Blockbuster online rental program
is to rent the DVDs of the TV series Firefly. Both Mrs. Salad and I
were extremely impressed and eagerly awaited this movie.

I liked the movie, but didn't absolutely love it. The things I liked
were the same things I liked about the series: witty dialog, interesting
characters, twisty and quick plotting. But what I didn't like is
spoiler-laden, and
will, I hope, be hidden below in most browsers. Highlight with your
mouse to reveal.

I didn't like: (a) the arbitrary and pointless deaths of two characters
from the series, Book and Wash;
(b) the deus ex machina of turning River into a
(literally) unbelievable indestructible killing machine;
(c) at the end, our hero "wins" by the convenient expedient of the
primary bad guy essentially giving up, for reasons that don't make
a lot of sense.

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